Students stream out of Bayard Rustin High School on W. 18th St. between Eighth and Ninth Aves. on Tuesday afternoon.
Teacher turmoil, failing grades raise questions at Bayard Rustin
By Chris Lombardi
Nearly four months after most city schools received their final “report cards” from the Department of Education, Chelsea’s largest public school, Bayard Rustin High School, still awaits its own Progress Report—and the marks don’t appear to be a vast improvement over the school’s initial failing grade.
Currently, some Rustin administrators are under investigation by the DOE for possible misconduct involving test scores, and the school is rapidly losing its most experienced teachers, with only a small fraction agreeing their principal is an honest man.
The investigation, by the DOE’s Office of Special Investigations, comes after Rustin received an “F” on its initial School Progress Report, according to Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers. While the initial report was quickly pulled after Rustin principal John Angelet submitted new data, claiming the earlier one was “full of errors,” teacher confidence in Angelet has dropped to consistently low levels. Only 4 percent of teachers expressed full confidence in their principal, according to a 2007 DOE school survey.
Teachers who spoke to Chelsea Now described a chaotic environment for both teachers and students at Rustin, located at 351 W. 18th St. Some have added that the school’s reorganization into “small learning communities,” though successful in some ways, has also exacerbated difficulties of the school’s neediest students. Many also questioned why Angelet, as principal of an “empowerment school” with direct accountability for results, has not been held more accountable by the DOE for the fearful environment at Rustin—let alone its abysmal test scores (in 2006, only 41.7 percent passed the Regents Exam in English, and just 34.1 percent did so in math).
Adding points to pass a class
According to several of the teachers interviewed, they were informed upon return from Christmas vacation that representatives from Special Investigations would be visiting, and that they might be asked questions about several members of the school’s social studies department.
“Jake,” a top-ranked teacher that recently left Rustin and is now searching for a new school, told Chelsea Now that OSI suspected that one of the administrators had changed grades on the Regents Exam. (Some Rustin staff interviewed for this article asked that not to be identified, fearing consequences for their relations with the administration.) “Half of the Social Studies Regents is done by machine, but the essays are graded, on a scale of one to five, by two teachers,” Jake said. “They switch, and each grades the other’s.” The suspicion, he contended, is that both teachers added a point or two to some of the grades, substantially increasing the pass rate for the whole class. “One teacher also graded all of her own papers and had a massive increase in her pass rate,” he added.
Bayard Rustin teachers interviewed by Chelsea Now spoke with deep concern about the emphasis on a teacher’s “pass rate,” and said they experienced both subtle and more blatant pressure to pass more students. “They publish everyone’s pass rates,” said “Blake,” a veteran Rustin teacher. “Before Angelet, I routinely had pass rates under 40 percent,” he added, stating that when students came into class at a fifth-grade reading level, he felt he had no choice but to fail them. After Angelet became principal in 2004, however, Blake felt pressured to give out more passing grades. “It’s turning into a high school that acts like an elementary school,” he said.
Whether intentional, as suspected by OSI, or generated by placing more emphasis on subjective data like poster and diorama projects, teachers said it is disservice to pass students who will already enter society at a socioeconomic disadvantage.
According to InsideSchools.org, a nonprofit online educational resource, nearly 80 percent of Rustin students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and only 22 percent enter the school reading at grade level. Yet, “people want the results right away,” said Julie Pintak, a veteran English teacher at Rustin, in an interview two weeks ago. “How do I stand up in front of a class of 20 kids—some of whom are at grade level, some of whom are 20 years old and don’t use capitals and periods—and don’t see anything wrong with that. These kids start out so far behind, and they want them brought up right away. How do you do that?” She added that letting students off easy is the opposite of why she teaches.
“I seem to thrive on [the challenge],” said Pintak, who emphasized that “dumbing down” the curriculum, with posters and glue, is the worst thing to do. “I’m not a big fan of the poster thing,” she said. I’m very strict about teaching my kids to read and write seriously. I tell them, when they say it’s hard, Why should I believe that my students—you—are too ghetto to learn this?”
Pintak noted that “I’ve kept myself ignorant” of any ongoing investigation by DOE. But other teachers agreed that pressure to pass as many students as possible—which makes them look good on the progress reports and moves students quickly toward graduation—may have something to do with the current investigation. All agreed that the pressure was intense: “No one ever pressed me on my pass rate before this,” Blake said. “They know where the kids start out.”
DOE spokesperson Andrew Jacobs confirmed OSI’s investigation at Rustin, but said that “due to confidentiality issues,” the department could provide no further details. Jacobs would not comment on the investigation’s possible impact the DOE’s prolonged process for giving Rustin a letter grade.
Many of those interviewed noted that the current controversies ill serve the legacy of former Humanities High School, which was once known as the quiet jewel of the school system.
Bayard Rustin students on W. 18th St. after leaving school on Tuesday.
‘Diplomats used to send their kids here’
Thirty years ago the school, then known simply as Humanities High School, was “more or less the neighborhood school for a middle-class section on Manhattan,” said Clara Hemphill, author of the book New York City’s Best Public High Schools.
Things started to change, Hemphill told Chelsea Now, about 20 years ago, after the establishment of the NYC Lab School for Collaborative Studies, a magnet school on W. 17th Street with an admissions exam and required portfolio submissions. Slowly, she added, Humanities’ diversity declined. “The story became that the smarter kids in District 2 went to Lab, or the Museum School or Stuyvesant. Humanities got... everyone else.”
Still, Hemphill and Rustin’s teachers all agreed that as recently as 10 years ago, the school was struggling but still functional. “Diplomats used to send their kids there. You could list the languages that were spoken in the building,” said Pintak, who has taught at Humanities/Rustin for nearly 12 years. “We had Albanian, we had Vietnamese, we had the languages of Africa.”
As a “zoned” school, Hemphill explained, Humanities was one of the few that would take admissions mid-year. “If you arrived in Manhattan in the middle of the year, as diplomats do, your kids would be assigned there. And as recently as 10 years ago, they had an honors track that had some good kids in it.”
“We were really diverse, partly because of those diplomats’ kids,” said Jake. “I had students from Yemen, from Iraq. It’s so much less so now.” The demographics listed on the DOE’s Website confirm his impression: 58 percent are Hispanic, 4 percent white, 25 percent African-American and 14 percent Asian.
Just as with some other large public high schools in Manhattan, like the Lower East Side’s Murry Bergtraum School, Rustin has seen its diversity decline partly as a side effect of educational innovations and more recent changes at the DOE under Chancellor Joel Klein.
Those changes broke up large schools like Rustin into “small learning communities” (SLCs). Now, each floor there contains its own such community: The Institute of Media and Writing; Art and Music Academy; Institute of Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences; and the International School of Business. Each has its own director, and they act as Angelet’s assistant principals. “They know every single kid,” Angelet told Chelsea Now last fall. “Not just by name, but who they are, what they need.”
Some results of the restructuring have been impressive. At IMBS, for example, the school reported in a December 2007 letter to parents: “Close to 90 percent of our seniors are on track to graduate, 99 students passed ALL classes during the first marking period, 105 students passed ALL classes during the second marking period,” and “we have an 87 percent attendance rate.” At the Institute for Media and Writing, Pintak oversees the production both of a 16-page broadsheet newspaper called “The Humanist” and a quarterly 36-page magazine called “Faces and Places.” Both include art, personal testimonies, Q&A interviews and thoughtful musings on life in New York City.
“Look at this,” said Pintak, showing galleys for the new issue. “It’s a 36-page magazine. It starts out with the presidential election. And—look at this! Stuyvesant doesn’t do this!” she said, pointing to one piece by a 10th-grader about her work as a teen volunteer at Planned Parenthood that incorporates statistics about abstinence education. “This is publishable!”
However, Rustin’s overall four-year graduation rate last year was 47.3 percent—significantly lower than the citywide average. And the school’s initial “F” on its school report card, whether or not it is eventually reversed, suggests that at least some data may show that the strategies employed by DOE and Angelet at Rustin are falling short.
Ruling with iron fist
The DOE’s Progress Reports have been under heavy criticism since they were issued in early November. Principal complaints cite their heavy emphasis on student progress, which appeared to penalize some well-performing schools, and the idea of trying to sum up a school’s environment, test results and diverse educational approaches with a simple letter grade. “The ‘F’ is a scarlet letter,” Hemphill said. “And I don’t see a lot of additional resources being offered those failing schools.”
Others, like Angelet, questioned whether the DOE’s new data system was ready for the prime time. The complex variables used to judge city high schools include not just test scores but overall Regents pass rates, “credit accumulation” (the rate at which students pass classes) and four-, six- and seven-year graduation rates.
After the initial rollout of the report cards, Angelet told Chelsea Now last fall that when he and his staff of assistant principals received the DOE’s first draft of the report in October, “we were astonished at the amount of errors.” It took two weeks, and a lot of staff time, he said, to find them all. “Regents pass rates that were off… Graduation rates, and how long it takes students to graduate? We found 164 seniors whose graduations were never entered into the system,” Angelet said. With nearly 2,000 students’ worth of data to comb through, it didn’t surprise him that the DOE had not finalized Rustin’s grade by the report’s November 5 rollout date. He was, however, optimistic about Rustin’s eventual grade, especially since the school’s DOE “Quality Review” in the spring had been positive.
But even back then, teachers at Rustin were unsurprised by the school’s “F,” many told Chelsea Now. “I assumed it meant Angelet would get in trouble,” said one staff member who asked that her name be withheld. “Now we’re all wondering when they’re finally going to do something.” The teachers had heard their union president, Randi Weingarten, mention the school by name in her November statement about the new progress reports in a way that reflected their experience.
“I was not at all surprised to discover that schools plagued by heavy-handed principals who have been unwilling to listen to their educators—such as the Acorn HS for Social Justice and Bayard Rustin HS for Humanities—received failing grades.” read Weingarten’s statement. “These schools and others have been on our radar screen for some time. Worse, our criticism of their inept administrative practices has not been heeded. Their ‘Fs’ are the inevitable result of what happens when principals—in tough situations—try to rule with iron fists instead of managing with open minds.”
This charge had already been brought by Rustin teachers in their responses to the School Environment Learning Survey. Only 4 percent “strongly agreed” with the statement that “The school’s leaders communicate a clear vision for the school,” while more than 70 percent disagreed. Seventy-six percent of teachers disagreed with the statement “I trust my principal at his word,” and 78 percent disagreed with “My principal is an effective manager who makes things run smoothly.”
Perhaps most damning, 70 percent disagreed with the statement that “The principal puts the needs of the children above other interests.”
Veteran teachers made clear that they were performing their work without adequate help from the administration: Only 11 percent had said they felt supported by their principal “to a great extent,” with most (66 percent) choosing “to little extent” or “to no extent.” And while generally respondents rated their colleagues highly, 70 percent disagreed with this simple statement: “Teachers in this school trust each other.”
In phone interviews over the past month, a number of Rustin staffers have described situations that illustrated the above assertions. The interviewees appeared both cynical and also somewhat hopeful about OSI’s investigation of the school: “We’re hoping the investigation blows something open,” Blake added.
In upcoming articles, Chelsea Now will investigate why teachers are leaving at an accelerated pace; reported ethnic/linguistic tension, gay-bashing, and other allegations of violence; and declining attendance, including student perspectives.
